


Vibrancy

by NotQuiteHumanAnymore



Category: X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/F, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-16
Updated: 2017-07-16
Packaged: 2018-12-03 02:12:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11522373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotQuiteHumanAnymore/pseuds/NotQuiteHumanAnymore
Summary: Contrary to the boundless rumors that stem from any form of celebrity, Emma Frost has no soulmate.She has never allowed anyone close enough to leave a mark on her.





	Vibrancy

Contrary to the boundless rumors that stem from any form of celebrity, Emma Frost has no soulmate.

She has never allowed anyone close enough to leave a mark on her.

Unlike Charles Xavier, who is covered in color from head to toe, whose palm is a bright blue that matches Mystique’s skin in the right light, whose forearm is a brilliant magenta, who has colors from every friend he's made and every child he's taught that changed his life. He never says which one is  _ the  _ one, but those who know him know.

The brightest color he has is the magenta. It's difficult to look at, and that is how you know, they say. That's how you know that that soulmate is the one of the romantic variety

Emma wore her unmarked skin like a badge of honor. She had no soulmate, no earthly ties, nothing in the world to distract her from her purpose. And the lack of vibrant color gracing her skin served another purpose, as well. Emma had the unique ability to draw people in under the suggestion that perhaps, if they were lucky enough, if they did exactly as she wished, they'd have the opportunity to be the first to leave a splash of color on her skin.

No one had gotten that lucky. Not in her lifetime. But the costume she wore was as much a taunt as it was temptation. "I have nothing to lose," it said, " come and get me, " it said.

Changing sides didn't change her attitude towards soulmates. If anything, she got bolder. She donned a cape and smiled more. She didn't mean to change her mind, and her position never changed, soulmates were still doomed, there was no hope for her, etc, et al.

But even without speaking to those on the team who had found their soulmates, even without them trying to convince her that soulmates existed to draw people towards those best suited to them, whether romantically or platonically or any of the crock she had been fed her entire life, Emma found herself.... Wondering. 

Of course, this only came after she was shot out of the sky.

She didn't know very many people who fought with arrows, but through her pain-blurred vision she would have sworn that that was what hit her.

Until the harpoon retracted and started pulling her down.

Blinding pain erupted, and she thought getting  _ shot _ had hurt, but oh, that was nothing in comparison to when the humans on the other end of the cable began to pull her in. 

_ Emma! _ And that was Jean, the damn goody-two-shoes, worried about everyone. She should know, by now, that Emma could take care of herself...

If only her vision didn’t insist on darkening and crumbling...

Emma tried to blink clarity back into her eyes, craning her neck to see the cable. If she could see it, she might be able to stop the mechanism with her telekinesis, but her eyes caught on the blood on her arm, weighing down the fabric of her cape. A pained groan broke free of her mouth at the sight. Another flash of red caught her eyes. Not blood red, this time, but Summers red, the red of Scott’s beams. It hit the cable squarely, severing it in the middle, according to plan, she was sure. 

The cable breaking didn’t stop her from falling, it just altered her descent path from  _ toward the enemy _ to  _ plummeting straight down. _

Emma had been floating over a ravine, thinking she’d be safer to use her telekinetic attacks from there, as no one would be able to get directly beneath her. 

She took comfort in the fact that she’d be dead before the bottom of the ravine had the chance for a painful, crushing introduction. It was already hard to stay awake.

She could see the X-Men, though. A few of them taking care of the clear and present danger, while a few others raced to her. 

Jean was at the forefront of the attack, and Emma realized that her descent was slowing slightly, Jean using her sub-par telekinesis to try and stop her from falling any further. Emma thought about helping, but she couldn’t even hear her own thoughts, let alone access her telepathy and telekinesis. 

Something... Something was happening to Jean. Emma would have chalked it up to the fact that she was dying, but she could see Scott balking at the sight as well. Jean was glowing, her outstretched hand enveloped in a brilliant orange.

Emma’s fall slowed in earnest, and her breath mingled with terror in her throat.

She tried to cry out a warning, tried to tell Jean to stop being so  _ foolish _ , but before she could find her voice, Jean ran over the edge of the ravine.

And kept moving. 

She caught Emma’s uninjured wrist and pulled her close, ignoring the blood soaking into her uniform as well, and Emma’s vision went black. 

Emma came to with a hole in her shoulder and a band of vibrant orange on her wrist. Jean sat across from her, gnawing on a fingernail with fervent intensity. Her eyes were wide and earnest and good and everything that Emma had always despised about her. Until she hadn’t.

She rolled over, gritting her teeth through the pain and shoving her hand under the pillow until she couldn’t see the orange anymore.

She ignored the small, disappointed sound that Jean made. It didn’t have an effect on her. It  _ didn’t _ . 

She waited until Jean finally took the hint and left, feigning sleep, and bolted upright in her bed, tearing her hand from beneath the pillow and back into view. Her fingers were trembling. 

But there, in a perfect mimicry of the way Jean’s fingers had closed around her wrist before apparently gaining enough control over her abilities to  _ fly them both away _ , was the bright orange imprint that Emma had been avoiding all her life. 

Because, of course, it would be Jean. It would be the one person on the team she had consistently attempted to tear down, the one person on the team that she hated more than anything that had happened to them-

Except, of course, she didn’t. And the color splashed on her skin was proof enough of that. If Emma were a betting woman, she would bet that her hate hadn’t simply lessened over the course of Emma’s tenure as an X-Man. The orange was bright enough to hurt her eyes, but she kept looking at it. She looked at it until her eyes watered and she knew the truth: Jean Grey was her _soulmate_.

She decided to invest in another pair of gloves. 

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first of the five drabbles that I wrote for EmmaJean fic week, and of them all, this is the one I was tempted to continue far faaaar beyond the 2,000 word limit. This was an exercise in extreme restraint.  
> Come yell at me on tumblr @scarletwix!


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